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Comment by smithjchris | Hacker News Reader

I have seen the win32 subsystem source (legitimately through shared source - I used to work for the British Ministry of Defence). It's very clean and tidy and not full of junk like that believe it or not.

The reason it still works is that they thought about it properly to start with. There have been very few extensions. The main one being adjusting pointer sizes (which are hidden behind a typedef like LPSTR anyway so that is irrelevent).

And for the record I take anything Joel says with a pinch of salt. The guy is a trendy blog mouth piece.

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In that case, I should have linked you directly to the Raymond Chen articles that Joel was paraphrasing:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/10/15/55296.a... http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/12/23/45481.a...

Here's a quote:

This is just the tip of the iceberg with respect to application compatibility. I could probably write for months solely about bad things apps do and what we had to do to get them to work again (often in spite of themselves). Which is why I get particularly furious when people accuse Microsoft of maliciously breaking applications during OS upgrades. If any application failed to run on Windows 95, I took it as a personal failure. I spent many sleepless nights fixing bugs in third-party programs just so they could keep running on Windows 95.

Windows 95 and Windows NT are not the same thing.

Precisely. I forget that the 9x series of operating systems existed sometimes!

I've seen dozens of those "personal failures." :-)

Granted, backwards ABI compatibility is a huge, complicated, thankless task for which you get no notice if you do the job perfectly. The ideal spot for the "break old programs" vs. "cripple new programs to avoid breaking old ones" dial is different for every project. Sometimes the right thing to do is keep the code base from degenerating into a pile of back-hacks. Sometimes it's all about bending over backwards to keep a long-gone vendor's bug from biting your end users.

Windows 9x was a mess. That same is not true with NT which is really nicely put together.

I've dragged some stuff which we wrote for NT4, recompiled it with VC++ 2008 (plus spent some time frigging VS settings) and it just worked on Win2k8. The original binaries, even though they were compiled 12 years ago, still run on Win2k3 fine and past the test suite (!).

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